


Memento

by executrix



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-23
Updated: 2009-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-05 01:41:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Boyd Langton thinks about some parallels with his own life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memento

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jaela](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaela/gifts).



Boyd Langton wishes he could tell DeWitt to stop bitching about the time he spends at home. It's not as if he were having any damn fun that way. It's just like taking work home, except that…what he wants to take home, isn't ready yet.

If Boyd were to have an Engagement with any of the Actives (as if!—he knows about Miss Lonelyhearts, which makes him wonder what DeWitt knows about him—and it made him put back a box of paper clips he was going to take home) it would be Sierra. He thinks she's…lanky and perky. Slinky. He'd like to dress her up in one of those drop-waisted dresses and Charleston with her and drink Sidecars. When Saunders was still Whiskey (when she was still at the Dollhouse at all) Boyd didn't find her attractive. Too frail, too breakable. Crispy. Which, as far as Boyd is concerned, works all right for potato chips, but not for girls.

It offends Boyd's Puritan soul even to think about thinking about Echo that way. That would be the worst kind of incest, not the fun happy kind of incest that makes for letters to Penthouse Forum. And, anyway, Boyd doesn't consider "can snap you in half without breaking a nail" an enticing quality in a woman. Admirable, perhaps, but not attractive. Sierra, especially when she's a blonde, has a Goldilocks quality. Boyd think she's Just Right.

If and when Boyd ever has a thought about Priya, he slams down the shutters. Because he likes to think of himself as someone who has been royally screwed over by life, so thinking about Priya is painful. She is in the World Series of life's victims, she makes him look like a Little Leaguer. His cherished scars seem trivial.

It's not just what happened to him, it's what he did. What he plans to do, if he can. Priya is the exception that proves the rule. Boyd likes to say that no one got to the Dollhouse from a monastery (although perhaps that should be their next destination). It's a climate-controlled French Foreign Legion.

Part of the job is having too many secrets to have a relationship. So, from time to time, Boyd enables a pressure relief valve and gets an outcall with Suzee. Suzee is absolutely not a Doll, and she probably had a chance to be a call girl but missed it. Suzee, however, is no streetwalker. She's an escort, and in fact sometimes Boyd takes her out for dinner or a movie. A basketball game, once. Suzee likes baseball better, but Boyd is not prepared to pay by the hour when extra innings are a meaningful risk.

You could probably say something similar about Boyd himself. He wasn't an FBI agent, wasn't in Homeland Security, was just a cop who finally made plain-clothes after too many years in uniform.

Boyd stays calm, maintaining his equilibrium at great cost, because there are just too many things that could go wrong. Have gone wrong. When he thinks about things he doesn't want to think about and might do more of the things that got him into this mess.  
There's a restaurant halfway between the Dollhouse and Boyd's condo that serves a nice coconut-crusted grouper. It's a nice place to eat, drink a craft beer, read a thriller. Boyd would identify with Matt Scudder except that things worked out a lot better for Matt. Suzee is never going to buy apartment houses or open an antique shop, much less marry Boyd.

Grouper reminds him of grouping, which he can't be as horrified about as he knows he should. He envies whatever sliver of innocence he finds anywhere, and there does seem to be some way that Victor and Sierra fit together, and that maybe Victor can redress some of the wrongs that were done to Priya. (Although, aren't Sierra and Priya Matter and Anti-Matter, and if they ever appeared together, nothing would result but destruction?) Boyd sometimes finds himself thinking that Sierra is not for him, because she belongs to Victor. Then he corrects himself because, when the world ends (maybe in 2012? Boyd is not overly dismayed by this possibility), History will tell America: Owning people. Hey, how'd that work out for you?

Boyd and his ex-wife did not fit together in that perfect way. They just happened to be dating each other when most of the people they knew were already married and not yet divorced.

Perhaps the Dollhouse won't even make it to 2012. There are too many pressures inside and outside. There haven't been any best-selling books that DeWitt can read, teaching her how to manage a workforce where the rank-and-file employees are whiteboards whose markings won't quite wipe clean, and the managers are all on the run from their own demons. Maybe decades from now, Victor and Sierra will be…Boyd isn't sure. Maybe running the last gas station before some vast stretch of desert. Victor sits on a rocking chair and plays the harmonica, and they still hold hands after they wipe a customer's windshield. If, decades from now, there's still gas and there are cars. Boyd is sure there will still be deserts. That part's pretty much certain to happen.

Now Boyd's son lives with him, because Evelyn just can't cope. She tried, after Evan left the VA hospital. Boyd's son is not a victor-with-a-small-v, although there is a sense in which he is a hero. He has medals and everything.

It makes Boyd feel good…benevolent…to think of futures for Victor and Sierra. She could be a celebrity chef, with her own TV show. Victor could have a furniture store, and make amateurish infomercials where his sincerity shines through.

 

So, if impossibly Boyd were to smuggle Victor out for the evening, he and Evan could have a wonderful chat about the good old days in Afghanistan. One of them can't remember anything, one of them volunteered for a five-year hitch as a marionette in order to not remember. Right now, Boyd's Mom is sharp as a tack, but maybe if she gets Alzheimer's, Boyd can fill the last slot in the album. Evan had most of the different state quarters, before he joined the Marines.

Isn't that how Dr. Watson met Sherlock Holmes? After Watson had been wounded in Afghanistan? Evan was never going to be a doctor, but maybe he could have had a very smart roommate. If Boyd hadn't…

Cops and soldiers. In the bigger world outside the Dollhouse, they're allowed to shoot people. If they shoot the right people, they get medals. If they shoot the wrong people—well, Boyd wonders how Dominic got to the Dollhouse. He knows how he did himself. He hopes he and Dominic don't have anything in common.

These days, if you're an L.A. cop and you shoot someone, there are all kinds of questions. Panels. Inquiries. If you shoot a kid, then you'll be all right if they find he was carrying a gun. It could also help if he had some crack vials. If he had a lot of vials, so he must have been dealing.

But if what he had in his hand, in the dark, when he was shot, was a cell phone…

And if his last call was to Evan….

And if there was less meth in the Evidence Room with Detective Langdon's signature than the log said there should have been, then it didn't help that much to say "I didn't steal it and sell it! It went up my nose!" or vice versa.

Evelyn left and took Evan, until Evan was old enough to leave a hot city where there were plenty of guns and volunteer to fight in a hot city where there were factory-made guns and home-made bombs.

TBI due to IED. Traumatic Brain Injury caused by an Improvised Explosive Device.

That is why Boyd is so interested in the possibility of implants without the Architecture. There might be something that he can give Topher (or, more likely, something that he can threaten Topher with revealing), so he can finally take work home. A flash drive that can fit into some USB port in Evan's head. And Evan will get his life back. Some kind of life, where he can function, and do things, and remember things.

Or at least the things that Boyd wants him to remember.


End file.
